Varjo raises Seed Money for its High Resolution VR headset

Varjo, the Finnish company working on an ultra high-fidelity mixed reality headset made a huge leap today. It was announced that $8.2 million has been raised, an expedient step towards launching its first set of developer kits.

The round was led by EQT Ventures, with subsequent participation from the Venture Reality Fund, Lifeline Ventures, Presence Capital, and a couple of others. The amount gathered will be used to build out the Varjo team, increase its marketing program, and continue funding research and development of its headset.

In an email sent by the CEO of Varjo; Urho Konttori, the funding scenario and future plans were evinced. “Simply put, we were seeking funds for our product R&D and other custom components which must be built in order to achieve crucial improvements in the device quality,”

Varjo’s headset, designed to be approximately the size and shape of a conventional virtual reality headset also offers human-eye resolution for a higher quality image. In addition to this, the system allows users view the world around them by moving a small, high-resolution display round the wearer’s field of view in time. This is achieved by the eye movements and by so doing, the brain is tricked into thinking that it’s seeing an image with much higher-resolution.

This is opposed to the simplest technology for existing VR gadgets which simulate rotation of the eye by employing the projective transformation to the images for each eye. Varjo’s technique addresses a major drawback of the traditional methods which is its inability to account for the changes in the position of the head; translation.

Ongoing Research To Fix Flaws

The ongoing research also aims to eliminate the apparent flaws in the display technology due to the magnification factor. This is because virtual reality headset stretch a single display along a very wide field of view. It also addresses the screen-door-effect- which causes gaps between rows and columns of pixels to be visible. This gives the user an illusion similar to looking through a screen door.

The whole tech community hopes Varjo succeeds, and if they do, the headset will provide users with a top notch viewing experience, much better than the currently available experience from headsets without this technology.

According to the CEO, there is continued progress on the developer edition of the headset as prepared, and the company plans to make an advertisement about its advancement at the Slush conference in Helsinki next month.